While the Second Coming means the return of Christ and a new world order in the Christian tradition, Yeats uses it to describe the birth of a mysterious beast. The beast is meant to figuratively subvert the birth of Christ, end the age of morality, and usher in an age of evil and immorality. As Yeats believed history was cyclical, he could also be referring to another evil (in a “First Coming”) that arrived in the prior 2,000-year cycle.

Although Yeats doesn’t directly call the beast that rises out of the desert a sphinx, the Egyptian icon is a lion’s body with a man’s head, just as Yeats describes. Yeats himself isn’t totally sure what or who the sphinx represents, but he uses the image to symbolize the coming historical phase of evil. His letter to a friend suggests that he later believed Hitler to be the unknown evil predicted in this poem, and his writings in The Vision prove that he anticipated evil figures like Napoleon to appear every 2,000 years. That Yeats uses a beast to illustrate his point is significant, as the Book of Revelation also mentions beasts who usher in the apocalypse.